>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?
It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.
It is entitlement. Nobody forced you to visit a web site with ads. The thing I said about people pretending they have no agency is exactly what you're implying.
Thinking you deserve free stuff because you don't like how it's presented is nothing but entitlement. If someone has to pay for your traffic, it's theft. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to come to terms with this. Maybe it's because everyone wants to believe their altruistic and this challenges it.
What's worse is seeing the same people who claim LLMs are stealing but have no issue with ad blockers. That level of incoherence is nuts to me.
People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising. They just use it. Ads are 100% predisposed on trespassing. Your average ad supported site wants discoverability by being free, then when the hosting costs bite, hope the end user conveniently forgets that they (the end user) have ultimate sovereignty over what code the hoster hosts they (the end user) desires to run on the end user's own hardware. You (the hoster) don't have a right to eyeball monetization. Old school Internet before SEO & mercantilization worked this way just fine.
LLM companies never asked to train on scraped content when they damn well intended to rent the result back commercially.
There is no incoherence here unless you accept axiomatically the Internet should make money. That was never the original purpose. Nor should that become it's ultimate purpose. In fact, I argue that this goes beyond the purpose of the Internet. Society is not yours to monetize. Period. Commercial relationships are not default.
For the last 30+ years, I've watched as society has completely forgotten how to be humans talking to humans and building relationships in lieu of trying to discover the fastest way to plug into someone else's wallet by selling something that isn't theirs to sell.
The relationship between People and Sites you're describing isn't as one-sided as you think.
A website wants visitors as much as a visitor wants to see the content of the website. If a website exists but doesn't get read, what is the point of it?
Personally, I would take readers using adblockers over no readers at all, the same way I'd want people reading a newsletter even if I had to print and pay for it myself.
It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.